Lego workshop brings play to North campus

Rosemary Andres nimbly used eight Lego pieces to assemble what appeared to be a dog.

The first-year Humber Hospitality Management student was tasked to build the creature as part of the Lego Building Workshop on Oct. 26 at the college’s North campus.

Andres was among nine who built animals in that exercise, and all nine created something different.

She said she attended the workshop event to expand her creative ability and develop her storytelling techniques.

“With the few exercises that were given to us during the workshop, I learned that every student thinks differently, and we all have different learning methods, but every exercise was successfully completed by each student in their own way,” Andres said.

Lego building is widely considered a good way for people to communicate their own thoughts or ideas and build a narrative or story through toy building blocks.

Graeme Dymond, a four-year brick artist who once worked for Lego Land Discovery as Canada’s first master model builder, oversaw the workshop. He’s now an independent, freelance brick artist, an educator and a master builder.

“I feel like this workshop is good for the students in Humber because it helps them expand their thought process, be creative and tell a story through building and that’s something they could carry on to their classroom,” Dymond said.

This was the first Lego building workshop for students this year, and there is one slated for faculty at Humber North campus on Nov. 30 from 2:55 p.m. to 4:10 p.m.

The purpose of the workshop was to help students with individual creative thinking, communicating their thoughts or ideas, and building narratives as a group.

During the Lego workshop, activities were assigned to students, and every activity had to have a story that was told through building.

So Dymond presented each student with eight pieces of Lego and they had to create any animal of their choice.

The students each completed the 10-minute exercise by creating completely different animals from each other. The exercise showed every student learns differently and that every student is capable of being creative in their own way.

Mohammed Hasan, a second-year architectural technology student and president of the Architectural Design Student Association (ADSA) at Humber, organized the event.

“We decided to run this workshop because we wanted to bring people together, help unlock student’s hidden creative potential and finding the importance of a common denominator between people,” Hasan said.

The Lego workshop helps unleash creativity, explore and unpack new things and find an analogy for learning, he said.

Since every student is different and learns in different ways, Lego building gives everyone a chance to tell their own story, think their own way and produce the same result but in multiple different ways, Dymond said.